Part XIII: Ioannikos ‘Vidyaraja’
Investiture of Yahyanakosh by Ahura Mazda and Artemis, the Yona Iwan at Taq-e Bostan, 10th century CE
We, the warriors of the Yuddha Gods: Areyas, Mangala, the Polemos, and others; hereby declare the defeat of the Mallabaya Kingdom and the liberation of all Parsiya, from Khozisthan to Nishapuras. No longer shall the followers of the bodhisattva Zarathustra be persecuted, but shall be honored for their faith in the Gods which delivered them from their oppressors.
In honor of His Majesty’s wisdom and fortitude, we Yuddhamakoi declare this city and the province named for it shall now bear his name, ‘Ioannika’, so that His Majesty’s deeds shall ring through the ages. Let it be known forever that here His Majesty, Deyavotistas, Deivanampeos Megalyteros Ioannikos, Emperor of Yavana, King of Gotya and Delchí, Protathletis of the Wheel-Bearers, called ‘Sword of Brahma’, defeated the warriors of Islam once and for all.
By his deeds Parsiya shall now and forever be home to the dharma.
Inscription of the Yuddhamakoi Column, Esfahan, 910-20 CE
904CE
The Yuddhamachy ended not with a shout or a cry, but a whimper. It seemed, as the fervent holy warriors streamed back towards India, unbloodied, that Islam truly had been defeated in the hearts of its own believers, who had meekly accepted the defeat of their rulers at the hands of warriors they called heathen. Many such returning warriors, restive from lack of fighting, committed pillaging and violence against the Persian communities they passed through on the way back to India. Yet the Persians were happy to see them go, as only a fraction of them left; many were given lands and titles in Persia, and sent for their households and relations to join them in managing the conquered territories. The capital at Isfahan, renamed Ioannika in honor of the emperor, was the greatest beneficiary of these population transfers, as thousands of would-be courtiers, craftsmen, and other royal hangers-on relocated in hopes of quickly ingratiating themselves to whoever would be named the new Vasolayas of Parsiya.
To their pleasure, Parsiya was divided up quickly over the coming months under Rajkomares, most prominently Ioannikos’ 4th and 5th sons, Pantalyan and Suryadathes. Nishapras, which had been held by the Yavana Emperor directly since 892 to safeguard the Atash Behram near Jajarm, was given over at the same time to Ioannikos’ 2nd son, Eskandaryas.
Persecution of Islam had begun well before the end of the war, but now became official state policy in Parsiya. Islamic worship was punishable by lashings, imprisonment, or seizure of property, while teaching Islam was punishable by exile or death. The Rajkomares were only too eager to be given royal commendation to seize wealth and property. Imams and prominent Islamic noble families were targeted regardless of guilt, and the peasantry quickly found that they could not defend themselves against charges of secretly practicing Islam if they displeased their new lords.
While some Parsiyans adopted the dharma, most adopted Zoroastrianism in public and ceased religious practice in general or secretly continued to practice Islam. In turn, the Rajkomares sent their retainers or hired Kyjires, itinerant warriors from India or the Gothic steppes, to root out Islamic sects in exchange for a share in any proceeds seized from accused Muslims. Ioannikos, never a friend of Islam, turned a blind eye to these proceedings as the will of his entrusted vassals. Those of his lords who maintained order in Parsiya were commended, regardless of methodology, while those who failed to do so were generally made to undertake humiliating public rituals or great sacrifices to the Gods rather than suffering any real consequences.
By late 905, unrest at the oppression of Muslims and the excesses of the Rajkomares was rising quickly throughout Parsiya, as violent reprisals between Olimpyans and Muslims escalated. In early 906, a massacre of some 300 ‘suspected Muslims’ in Abarkawan nearly ignited a province-wide revolt, prompting Ioannikos to hasten plans to crown a King of Parsiya. That he chose his son Pantalyan in 905 was only surprising to those who had expected him hold on a little longer. Under Pantalyan’s light hand, Ioannika had maintained a level of peace and stability that had yet to return to the rest of the kingdom since the Yuddhamachy, and his philosophical writings on religion and frequent dialogue with the Sokratea and Ioannikos himself had endeared him to the emperor. He was crowned Vasolayas at the Giyan Sofia, the Kappadoki estate near Zarrinshahr, in the spring of 906.
Shortly thereafter, Rajkomaros Alaricos of Kerman, who had conquered much of the ancient kingdom of Gujarat, requested permission from Ioannikos to be crowned a king himself. Despite the danger of the growing power of the vassals of the Rajya, Ioannikos granted the request, and crowned Alaricos himself as the appointed representative of the Gods on Earth in a ceremony at Al-Haur. After the ceremony, which was well-attended by the lords of the Rajya, many of the attendees came down with fever.
Within a few months, what came to be called the Gedrosian Flu had spread to every corner of the empire, with the most lethal outbreaks occurring around Delhi and Ioannika. Its victims lingered on with fatigue, nausea, high body temperatures, and loss of appetite well after a normal fever would have broken, and it claimed the lives of thousands within the first months of its arrival in Delhi. In Ioannika, cases were fewer but more severe, with a higher percentage of deaths. By the end of summer, the situation in Delhi was drastic enough that Ioannika sequestered himself and his court away in the royal estate and refused all visitors, including family members from the Kappadokion.
In Parsiya, Pantalyan codified strict regulations against violent repercussions on Muslims, forbade executions for all non-violent crimes, and set strict limits on the seizure of property. Accusations of religious heresy were no longer left to the lords to prosecute, but were instead to be brought before a Dikisabha, a court of appointed lords who would determine guilt, justice, and amends in such cases.
The curbing of state religious violence and the spread of the Gedrosian fever helped to release the mounting tensions in Parsiya. With a percentage of the populace incapacitated at any moment, and the rest fearful of getting sick themselves, will to resist the king fell off sharply, especially in Ioannika and its direct environs. Alms distributed from the emperor out of the Silk Road tariffs also helped in relieving tensions and drawing together an empire that was rapidly expanding and growing unwieldy.
Near the end of the year, the empire was further shocked by the death of of Doryakratos Theodoric, Priest-King of Kosalas. In the midst of losing a war against the Tibetan kingdom in Nepal, the Gedrosian Fever had decimated the faithful in the great cities along the Ganges and robbed Theodoric of his will to live. Officially, he passed away in his sleep after a long meditation in which he communed with Ades, Lord of the dead. Unofficially, it was believed he had poisoned himself in despair.
Regardless of the means, no succession had been settled on for the kingdom, and so the Sokratea met to determine who should succeed Theodoric. It was the position of Ioannikos that the title should return to the Deyavotistas, the highest authority of the Temple, to be appointed. However, he wasn’t willing to overrule the Arkhierei, whose strong authority for themselves he believed to be necessary for spreading the dharma into the Deccan and Parsiya. Thus, the matter went to a vote in the Sokratea, which narrowly decided for its own authority in appointing the king. Shortly thereafter, candidates were nominated, and a little-known Hiereus from the Gothic communities in Zabulistan, called Thorismond, was selected as the new Doryakratos. As his first act, he negotiated a peace treaty that, while unfavorable to Kosalas, was still preferable to the continuing devastation of the debilitating siege of Bithor while disease ravaged the countryside.
Despite the continuing pace of the disease, 907 was a relatively quiet year, spent by most of the nobility cloistered away or on campaigns away from affected areas. Ioannikos’ correspondence with Pantalyan drew the two ever closer, culminating in the appointment of Pantalyan as Steward of the Rajya and his anointment as a member of the Companions. King Alaricos expanded his holdings in Gujarat, and Pantalyan seized a portion of the Caspian Sea coast from the Arab loyalists. Prince Suryadathes waited out the disease in the Qasrid Kingdom, gathering dissident warriors to help him seize Basra at some later date. Kashgar province, lost to Buddhist rebels over a decade earlier, was re-conquered by Apalodatis of Indikas.
These successes weren’t being mirrored through the Olimpyan world. Sogdia became mired in another civil war, due to Queen Viviana’s lineage: as a descendant of Megas Theodoric’s bastard Varshasb, and having inherited the throne from her father rather than conquering it herself, the true Kappadoki of the realm considered her illegitimate. Isauros of Khiva was appointed their leader and led an uprising in 908 that threatened to upend Queen Viviana and her husband Alaricos, Ioannikos’ second son. Regardless of the disastrous history of Theodoric’s descendants in Sogdia and Parthia, Ioannikos joined the war, sending some 5,000 men to Bukhara.
At the same time, war was engulfing the Tibetan plateau. Anini Pal’s son had proven to be a passive ruler, and in the absence of aggression on his part, a council of Hierei had taken command of Purang province and invaded Tibetan imperial territory in Xigaze. Ting ‘the Dragon’ quickly rose to pre-eminence among the council and lead the war effort to much success against the weakened Tibetans until their Chinese suzerains pledged support, hoping to maintain the status quo on the plateau. Though China proper wasn’t going to war, the Western Protectorate had received an expeditionary force that would easily sweep the Purang Olimpyans aside. Ioannikos decided to involve himself in the war, leading nearly 8,000 men himself to northern Tibet, where they intercepted half as many troops from the Protectorate and defeated them soundly.
Both wars came to a favorable close soon after the involvement of Yavana armies. By 910, Ioannikos had returned to the capital, his vision of an Olimpyan world seemingly fulfilled and then some. Diplomats from Delhi could travel all the way to Byzantion without passing through lands held by non-Olimpyans, though the fastest land routes still went through Armenia and Azerbaijan, held by Christians and Muslims respectively. The dharma was spreading in every direction, well beyond the boundaries he had envisioned for it, and everywhere it took root it seemed to become immovable. The emperor’s hand was heavy in the East, but in the West, where ‘Yavana’ was merely an exotic term for a far-off empire, the Olimpyan kingdoms had overtaken nearly all of their neighbors, and their meteoric rise still seemed poised to continue.
Yet through it all, the Gedrosian Fever persisted in Delhi and along the Ganges. It seemed to spread by trade, which continued to flow even during the worst of the fever in 907, but there was never any official effort to combat the disease itself, only to treat its symptoms among the populace, leaving it free to spread back and forth between Delhi, Mathura, Sthanivara, Varanasi and Bithor even through 910 and 911. In 909, it even claimed King Apalodatis of Indikas. When Ioannikos returned to Delhi from Tibet later that year, he sequestered himself away at the keep in Delhi, where supplies could be more readily maintained than at his palace grounds, and cut off the outside world except for by written message.
This was the unbroken course of 909 and 910, save for an omen that appeared to Ioannikos in his sleep in the summer of 910. In it, he saw his empire laid to waste and barbarians of the cross and the crescent ravaging India while heretics arose and rendered the dharma into shattered pieces. This ignited in him a fervor to destroy Islam finally in a great conquest of the Arab peninsula and the taking of Mecca. Plans were drawn up to go to war with the Shia muslims, who had only recently secured the peninsula from the Sunni Muhallabids. Before the year was through, the war was ready to begin, save for the calling up of troops to Delhi who would invariably catch the Fever and bring it with them.
By the time the fever did break in early 912, Ioannikos’ war-fervor had subsided. The Shia had shored up their numbers, and Basra, necessary to facilitate an invasion by land of Arabia, was a hotbed of rebellions and heresies that threatened to chew up any army foolish enough to try to cross the rivers there. The Rajya had something of a navy at its disposal, but it was only in recent decades that it also had a true coastline to necessitate such a thing. An invasion across the Persian Gulf would be costly and difficult against skilled Arab sailors, though it might be managed if the will was there.
In Parsiya, some in-roads had been made to the orthodox Zoroastrian communities, but for the most part, progress was slow and many Parsiyans held their rulers in contempt. In some regions where feelings were more amiable, dual rites were held to satisfy both the Hierei and the Mobeds, or the Temples coordinated to observe each other’s rites as well as their own without conflicting. This maintained stability more than Ioannikos’ repressions, but a gulf was beginning to grow between the allowances of Pantalyan’s court and the Sokratea.
Many of the mosques that had been repurposed as shrines and stupas contained no icon, or were oriented around a burning brazier. Spaces that the Yuddhamakoi had cleared for circumambulation in the same temples had now been arranged with floor mats for prostration towards the Atash Behram fire at Nishapur. Fire had its place in the Olimpyan dharma, and Ioannikos had respect for the Zoroastrians, who had survived centuries of persecution by Islamic rulers to maintain their faith, but he suspected these rites were being used to avoid confronting the Muslims of Parsiya about their heretical sympathy towards Islam. If they prayed towards one fire for every rite, if they did not circumambulate a reliquary and observe the jatakas of the many gods and their doings, and did not worship in the physical presence of a deity, their connection to the dharma was tenuous at best. Vilaksynan, Oikodomos of the court, was dispatched late in the summer of 912 to Ioannika, to determine the extent of the divergences and to ensure Islam was not being permitted by Pantalyan’s court, putting a great strain on the close friendship of Ioannikos and his son.
In the meantime, the Emperor retired to Theodorion. His son and heir Agateclaya had commissioned a grand statue of Ioannikos to adorn the grounds of the old family estate, and invited his father to break the ground. It was during the stay at Theodorion that he was introduced to the King of the Itilos tribe, Ioulianos, who by coincidence had been on a pilgrimage to the mountains and was staying with Agateclaya. In many ways, he was a successor of Theodoric too; his tribe had secured Khazaria against the Serbian slavs and conquered much of the Rus, bringing the dharma with him all the way to Moskva. His efforts at converting the Suomenusko had been met with heavy resistance, but he had persevered against much of it. In seeking his advice, Ioannikos became good friends with Ioulianos, who recommended a return to conversion by force: “Who can raise a sword to you, mighty emperor? They know in their hearts their god does not stand with them. Let them wear the armor of faith and see what protection it lends them against the spearpoint of a holy warrior. I have yet to encounter the barbarian whose Gods are mightier than ours.”
The statue at Theodorion was named ‘“Yuddhamakos Fotismenos”, as inspired by the words of King Ioulianos. When the emperor returned to Delhi in the spring of 913, he did so intent on forcibly resolving the Zoroastrian issue.
Oikodomos Vilaksynan returned from Ioannika shortly thereafter to report on the situation in Parsiya. Pantalyan and the Heirety of Parsiya were steadfast in their faith in the gods of Olimpos, and their belief that their new practices brought them into closer connection with them and inspired greater knowledge in a movement towards enlightenment. Yet Vilaksynan found they had little reverence for the Buddha or the Middle Way. They were more interested in ‘Pure Wisdom’, attained through esoteric rituals of cleansing fire borrowed from the Zoroastrians. Many of the peasants still worshipped Islam in secret, and in touring the countryside, Vilaksynan had found a number of temples that he suspected of harboring Muslim sympathies. Some number of Imams had even been allowed to ‘renounce’ Islam and lead Olimpyan rites at the same temples they had led as mosques before the war.
Such practices were greatly distressing to Vilaksynan, but Pantalyan had dismissed his concerns as overreaction. The rites he approved the Parsiyan Hierety to observe were those appropriate to the people of Parsiya, who he believed would embrace the Eightfold Path with time and a light touch.
Vilaksynan’s news travelled quickly At an emergency congregation of the Sokratea, it was decided that prostration was permissible as an act of devotion to the Gods, but could not take the place of circumambulation, and prostration towards Mecca, or in a direction in which Mecca lay, was prohibited as appearing to deceive the Gods. As such, it was enforceable by exile, dismemberment, or death. The Dikisabha courts of Pantalyan were stripped of religious authority, and all such matters were ordered to be brought to the emperor’s attention to appoint Arkhierei to oversee instead. The Sokratea further warned against the formation of sects, and urged the Hierety of Parsiya to bring their rites closer into alignment with those practiced in the rest of the Olimpyan world. Vilaksynan was dispatched to ensure the decree of the Sokratea was delivered to Pantalyan and to make observations of the king’s progress over the next year.
In Ioannika, the mood of the Parsiyan Hierety had already turned against the Sokratea. The decree against sectarianism and certain prostrations fell on deaf ears. Vilaksynan was given a false list of temples and regions where secret Islamic activity was suspected by the Hierety, and a group of companions escorted him on a wild goose chase through the country, chasing after false heresies, while the Hierei in Ioannika held discussions about how to pursue their own understanding of the faith in an empire that would likely declare them heretics. The more fiery priests called the Kappadoki - King Pantalyan, their highest sponsor, notwithstanding - no better than the Muhallabids and Abbasids before them. ‘Kherdayasna’ was not only compatible with the Legends and the Gods they had always worshipped, but was, to them, the most enlightened form of worship, one that brought them closer to the Gods than any other.
King Pantalyan agreed, and, in defiance of the Sokratea, issued an edict declaring himself an open practitioner of the Kherdayasna dharma in fall of 913. The sect quickly spread through the province, gaining footholds into Islamic communities which had fiercely resisted mainstream Olimpyanism.
News of this occurrence reached Delhi ahead of Vilaksynan, who was slow to realize the deception of the Parsiyan priests. Only Ioannikos’ love for his son kept him from declaring Pantalyan a heretic and sentencing him to death. Instead, he took up a correspondence directly, hoping to sway the ‘Stokadaraja’, as he had come to be known, from the dangerous course on which he had started. In turn, Pantalyan’s words did inspire sympathy in the emperor for the Parsiyans, who were understandably slow to embrace the dharma, having spent centuries resisting Islam and being persecuted for it. However, the Sokratea had been clear, and the matter of sectarianism was among the few settled doctrines of the dharma ever since the expulsion of the Prometheans; those who drew lines between followers of the Way were not, themselves, followers, but deceivers.
Ioannikos delayed the congregation of the Sokratea in 914, out of fear they would brand Pantalyan a heretic, by declaring war on Tibet, supposedly over persecution of Olimpyans in Kosalas. Both Ioannikos and his father before him had often been absent from meetings of the Sokratea for all manner of reasons, but as the Sokratea would have no choice but to address the goings-on in Parsiya, which directly concerned Ioannikos, the delay was accepted with little protest.
This would be one of his last acts as emperor. Ioannikos passed away in the royal litter on the way to Kosalas in fall of 914.
